Last week, Cole Camplese and I presented version 2.0 of our Web 2.0 and HigherEd talk. As we did last year, we tried to make it as informative and entertaining as possible. The short synopsis of this year's talk is that Penn State has a much better Web 2.0 story one year later. We reused some of the slides from last year, but found that Web2.0 required far less explanation than our previous talk. This gave us more opportunity to do a progress report.
We updated the status of blogging, podcasting, and wikis. We also included discussions of some of the social networks that students are using, e.g., Facebook and mySpace, and ones that "adults" are using like LinkedIn, gather.com, and Meetup.com. We spoke about the social phenomenon of flickr and twitter and jaiku. This year, in addition to talking about del.icio.us social bookmarking, I spoke a little about my Penn State social bookmarking prototype, which I call PawMarks (see me if you'd like access). One of the really cool Web 2.0 concepts that Cole spoke about was the community support sites or hubs (e.g. those for podcasting at Penn State or blogging at Penn State). These leverage the collective intelligence of the user communities in very Web 2.0 ways.
I think the state of Web 2.0 at Penn State is much better than it was last year and I think both Cole and I see HigherEd coming around and embracing Web 2.0. It was great to see the conference itself supporting notions of Web 2.0 with a conference blog site and a conference "tag." Overall, I think our talk went pretty well and we've received some very good feedback on it. It is always a pleasure to present with Cole.
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